Is Google moving out of China? This won’t be a good news for SEOers China, as Baidu.com will dominate the entire search market. I read this on a random SEO blog which I cannot remember the name, a Chinese internet expert whose name is Yanping Hu posted “Google is moving out of China, all the servers are relocating” on sina microblog (similar to twitter) and he ensured what he said is truth. Soon, Google PR denied this information as expected.
Here is the screenshot of his message:
Translation here:
True message: Google starts to move out of China, all the servers in China are relocating
If this news is true, why would Google give up Chinese market? Let’s go back to the history and reveal the story between Google and Baidu (Baidu is the largest search engine is China)
2000
- - Google started to provide search service in Chinese (no team and no office in China)
- Baidu was founded by Robin Li and his friend Eric Xu and started to provide search technology to some of giant websites in China
2001
- – Baidu created its own search service, but not too many people using it
2002
- – Baidu has realised the threat from Google, they gathered three categories of search results, which are religion, politics and sex, and offered these hundreds of pages documents to the government.
- Later, Google was banned in China for unknown reason, although Google was back soon, but some features were forbidden to use.
2005
- - Google China was founded, led by Caifu Li, who resigned his CEO position in Microsoft China.
2006
- – An investigation found out that Google’s new China search engine censored criticism of the Chinese government, teen pregnancy, alcohol, dating and homosexual
2007
- - Infamous Baidu DNS Hijacked Google Traffic in China, apparently the government had helped Baidu because the DNS server are under goverment control.
2009
- – Government accused that Google was spreading erotic messages to teenagers because of sex related search queries (really dirty ones) appeared in recommended search queries (normal query). Though the evidence revealed later showed this was a conspiracy. Government controlled television reported this, and meanwhile, Google was banned again
- Baidu recently announced its deal with the largest mobile service company, China Mobile. Baidu services including internet search, music download and forum will be pre-installed on 3G handsets. Baidu acted so fast this time to take over the mobile search market share, which will probably force Google to change its strategy this year.
So now, we see that google is possible to move out of China, reasons are below
- 1. Google not only has to obey US law, but also local law
2. Google never got better relationship with government than Baidu, and it’s always hard for Google to deal with Government
3. 3G wil enter China soon, Baidu took the advantage already to make deals with mobile companies. It’s believed that Baidu will dominate Google on mobile search once again.
From my own point of view, there is no way Google will give up Chinese market. Google search market share kept increasing for 4 years since Google China was found in 2005, and Google Adwords is still taking huge amount of money every year. It is indeed very hard to compete with Baidu, especially in such a complex market environment, but I do believe Google will do better and better.
What’s your thought on this news? Do you think Google will move out of China? Please leave your comment below and share what’s in your mind, thank you.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It is true Baidu has a higher number of users, but the more educated and urban Chinese population is actually using Google for their queries. Chinese people with more income are more likely to start using Google over Baidu… Google can make good money of this niche (richer) population.
The Mobile aspect of this it is really interesting!
Thanks for the insight!
I think Baidu is focusing on daily life improvement, thus they have such a large group of application. Baidu is more “entertaining” than Google imo, and this is why baidu is clever, they know exactly what Chinese people like.